Embodiment is not Headlessness
An art professor once told me that when she taught figure drawing, students had a weirdly common tic of drawing their nudes faceless. She knew an artist who rendered his nudes with a renaissance-y sense of proportion and detail, but left the heads hairless and blank. She said it looked like a chimera: the body of a human; for a head, a grape. “You don’t have to do, like, a portrait, but bodies have faces.”
I remembered this when seeing in passing the opening of On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovering of the Obvious.1 It includes an image that looks like this:
.This was a very weird image to see, because (while much better technically, and with another important difference which I’ll mention later) it reminds me of the self-portraits on the creation of which I helplessly spent almost all of my chemically-enhanced focus during the brief period in high school when I took2 Vyvanse: my direct visual experience of myself, usually including the notebook in my lap & my drawing hand, sometimes a recursive portrait in the drawn notebook.
I am not going to include any of my shitty high school self portraits in this essay, so to indicate the “other important difference” I mentioned above: I will include this self-portrait by Ernst Mach:
People mention this self-portrait often in connection with Harding and his headlessness epiphany, but this is clearly a picture of someone who has a head. It’s not exactly like direct experience: one’s own nose and eyebrows are out-of-focus and shifting in the visual field and very hard to draw. It’s a little artificial & symbolic3 (it looks kind of like what it looks like when you close one eye, I guess). But it reveals that the totally headless/faceless portrait at the top of the page is equally artificial and symbolic.
In fact, the “having no head” thing is a pretty conceptual, necessarily visual & thus necessarily head-focused way to organize your experience. Harding says:
There exist, then, two sorts - two widely different species - of human being. The first, of which I note countless specimens, evidently carries a head on its shoulders (and by “head” I mean an opaque and coloured and hairy eight-inch ball with various holes in it) while the second, of which I note only one specimen, evidently carries no such thing on its shoulders.
But that’s only true if you’re only using your head to experience; specifically, if you’re only using your eyes. If you reach up above your shoulders and touch,4 you will find a hairy eight inch ball with various holes in it.
Interestingly, Harding does mention the nose-blur:
Consider, for instance, the designer of advertisements - whom nobody would accuse of fanatical devotion to truth. His business is persuading me, and one of the most effective ways of doing that is to get me right into the picture as I really am. Accordingly he must leave my head out of it. Instead of show-ing the other kind of man - the one with a head - lifting a glass or a cigarette to his mouth, he shows my kind doing so: this right hand (held at precisely the correct angle in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture, and more-or-less armless) lift-ing a glass or a cigarette to - this no-mouth, this gaping void. This man is indeed no stranger, but myself as I am to myself. Almost inevitably I am involved. No wonder these bits and pieces of a body appearing in the comers of the picture, with no controlling mechanism of a head in the centre to connect or operate them -no wonder they look perfectly natural to me: I never had any other sort! And the adman’s realism, his uncommon-sensical working knowledge of what I am really like, evidently pays off: when my head goes, my sales resistance is apt to follow. (However, there are limits: he is unlikely, for instance, to show a pink cloud just above the glass or the cigarette, because I supply that piece of realism anyhow. There would be no point in giving me another transparent nose-shadow.)
The part of the internet where I have found/placed myself contains a lot of people who are very interested in embodiment, which I’m very interested in too, and a lot of people who have some kind of trauma around their intellects or around thinking, which I can at least relate with. As interested as I am in the embodiment stuff, what makes me shrink back from it is a general tic that people have of mistaking embodiment for headlessness, of deprecating what happens in their heads. Maybe this is a necessary first step but it’s so theoretically confused that I simply cannot take advice from people (I interpret as) acting in this framework.
It reminds me of the advice I got in basically every yoga class5 I attended for many years: of not thinking, not striving, not trying to achieve anything in yoga. I took the advice for a long time. But I found myself much less frustrated & ultimately more relaxed when I made a (very cursory—almost too cursory to mention, especially compared to for instance embryosophy) investigation into what I was doing and how it worked, anatomy, etc; when I used that investigation to set goals; when I stopped focusing my awareness purely on the physical sensations of the present moment & started judging that awareness, comparing it with physical sensations I remembered in the past, connecting those physical sensations with their results in terms of my changes in ability, & using that to predict how my current physical sensations would change me—predictions I could later judge against what actually happened, and so on. And my yoga practice became much more satisfying, & much more embodied, once I stopped taking my teachers’ advice to let it be headless.
It’s kind of embarrassing to use my own yoga practice as an example, because it’s not that great & also you have (probably) never done yoga with me, which makes it bad evidence. Nonetheless I think I’m onto something, & the general tic of mistaking headlessness for embodiment is getting in embodiment’s way.
I then read it, quickly enough that I probably didn’t fully understand it, but the book itself is not directly what I’m talking about so I’m not too worried. Also, that link is toa book you can buy; you can also read the book free but imageless here.
legally prescribed, to me, if you were wondering
I tried different failing tactics to render the moving nose-blur. But unlike Mach or Harding, I have another trait which visually and tactile-ly reminds me I have a head: long hair (relative to theirs at least), which I can feel moving or see falling in my face. I would often frame my weird obsessive stimulant-induced hypergraphia self-portraits with the bits of hair I could see.
something which I do a hell of a lot; touching my hair is my main stim, and does not allow me to forget bout my head
pretty mid ones, I’m sure; not representative of the yoga tradition in a platonic-form sense, though surely representative of what is available
Yes I think you’re onto something. One way I think about this (or something similar at least) is that a common feature of many mainstream spiritual practices is to encourage “surrender.” Encouraging “will” is more often part of fringe practices. In my experience “full surrender” is actually not a good outcome. Some level of that helps and seems important, but will and choice seem important too, and in the end, I don’t think we are incarnated here in order to have no goals.
I think that there are often social incentives at work behind the thing you are describing here.
There are a lot of dateable people who are overly neurotic, intellectual, and stuck-in-their-heads. I think the amount of younger people who would self-describe themselves in this way is rising. I also think that a lot of people like this are attracted to people they perceive as the opposite to them: carefree, unneurotic, grounded, 'simple' life-livers.
The problem is that I think with the increase in too-cerebral too-neurotic people (partially social media stuff partially the cognitive and behavorial difficulty of functioning is rising), we are losing people that would have otherwise formed into the types of people that naturally pair with too-cerebral too-neurotic people. We have too many too-cerebral too-neurotic people relative to the types of people that tend to be 'good for them' (obviously 'good for someone' is subjective but pragmatically if you take a lot of personality characteristics to enough of extremes, they lead to people 'failing' and washing out of society, so most of us have a vested interest in finding and pairing with people whose flaws have opposite polarities to ours).
This means that, while it might not be right or overall beneficial to embodiment practice, I think that getting yourself to be the type of person that equates embodiment with headlessness is a great dating grift. Obviously I don't think that this is how many people in these circles directly think about it, but I think social groups naturally disseminate socially beneficial beliefs over time.